The best games you've (probably) never played #4

The best games you've (probably) never played #4

The NES is perhaps most notable for saving the video game industry, at a time when Atari was tail spinning into oblivion. But perhaps its most important contribution to the gaming landscape is that it made truly representational game play a possibility. The NES, significantly more so than its main competition at the time, the Sega Master System, encouraged developers to create total end-to-end experiences, rather than just arcadey high-score challenges.

Before the NES, to propose a surrealist game would have been preposterous. Every game was abstract - the Atari 2600 A-Team game had you play as a disembodied Mr. T head. But along came the NES, and all of a sudden you began to play as recognizable cartoon characters. Animation was more than just an on and off state. Backgrounds broke free of being solid and/or blinking colors.

Now, anyone armed with an emulator can tell you that American gamers were deprived of a whole bunch of titles, for better and worse. Nintendo of America acted as a gatekeeper, and despite being driven by a heavy-handed sense of morality at the time (and letting quite a bit of poor translations slip by), they did bring over most of the really good titles and leave a lot of the lackluster games behind. Short of a bunch of RPGs, there were few gems that were overlooked.

Unfortunately, and this is a problem that still persists today, a whole bunch of obscure curiosities that were released unchecked on the fledgling Famicom never saw the light of day on the NES (apart from the odd Chubby Cherub here and there). Now, in retrospect, a lot of these games are simply unintentionally strange. Wacky concepts made into a hit-or-miss game, many inheriting their wackiness from either cultural curiosities or concessions to the gaming hardware.

There are far fewer games that make you say "what the hell?" then insist that all your friends play it too.

Utsurun desu is one of those games.

Utsurun desu is based on a manga of the same name by Sensha Yoshida. The title translated means "You'll Get Infected," and couldn't be more appropriate. Both the comic and the game are a certain kind of "David Lynch" weird - they have an underlying logic, but you have to work to get at it. And then you're still left feeling like you might have missed something along the way.

Now, one important thing to note here is that in Japan, a game using licensed characters didn't immediately mean the game was going to suck, as LJN/Acclaim had conditioned so many American youth to believe. In fact, the Sanrio (Hello Kitty) licensed games were some of the best NES-era titles never to make it overseas. But Utsurun desu reached its own level of greatness precisely because it didn't simply drop sprites that resembled familiar characters into a stock game engine. But that's not to say that it didn't borrow liberally from titles that came before it.

Utsurun desu toes a curious line. I like to think of it as the Killer 7 of its day - it's more of a concept piece than a game, but it has a solid game behind it. Like the comic parodies the conventions of the genre it inhabits, so is the game a parody of other NES games. Strangely enough, it's better constructed than some of the more serious-minded knockoffs of the games it was inspired by.

The video game industry, like any creative industry, has its fair share of send-ups. Parodius by Konami, for example. Or perhaps the more contemporary Conker. But these games tend to beat you about the head with overblown genre conventions; they're just as much fanservice to the games they are lampooning as parodies of them. Super Smash Bros. can be seen as both an homage to and a satire of the entire fighting genre in this light.

Utsurun desu, by contrast, amplified the strangeness of commonly accepted genre conventions, holding them up to the player for scrutiny:

"Look at how strange it is that this guy tears off the top of his head to throw it at you."

or

"Why is it that you can only climb down one of these pipes?"

The game even plays with the notion of space - one seemingly impassable area in the first level allows you to scale the scenery in the background, switching depth indiscriminately but at the same time establishing early on an internal logic unique to the game. Were it not for this initial scene, a player might be lead to believe that later areas were just difficult or insurmountable because that's all part of the joke. But this key scene states firmly that, as weird as things get, the player is always in control.

Now, words can hardly do a game like this justice. If one were to write a FAQ, the results would likely end up reading like a Dadaist tract. "Pee on the flowers, then dance, and the endless forest will turn to night and a guy will pelt you with melons." And that's just the start of the second stage.

The game comes chockablock full of in-jokes for gamers. The first stage ends with your anthropomorphic frog companion throwing his artichoke-like head at you like it was Cutman's blade. Other enemies are almost aggressively genre-busting in their non-conformity: take the jumproper, where you have to wait patiently for him to topple over with a leg cramp before he is susceptible to attack.

At this point, it is worth explaining that the basic "attack" of the main character (a middle-aged man dressed as an otter) is a short-range shooing motion with his hand. Other attacks are accessible via a slot machine style top-menu, accessed by holding down the attack button. They include a hula dance (represented by a music note), a bi-directional projectile attack (represented by a flame), an explosion (represented by a demon's head, and appearing for the shortest amount of time), and what can only be explained as a "watering the flowers" attack that leaves you open to injury, for those who get greedy and hold the button down for too long.

Each stage leans toward either the genre standard (ice level, desert level) or the surreal (a moon containing famous landmarks such as the Sphinx and the Easter Island Moai, an office building harboring aliens), and has an RPG-style shop to act as a checkpoint. Once again flaunting convention, you begin with some cash and earn ridiculous amounts throughout the game, allowing you to purchase tossable items (the prices and occurrences of which are apparently completely random).

For a game that careens so wildly from beginning to end, a huge amount of care was given to the play mechanics. One enemy - a naked hiker that runs wildly toward you - exists only to get shot in the back by an arrow. If you get hit by him, you lose energy. If you kill him, you get hit by the arrow. After he gets hit, he skids toward you in a heap. Few more serious games paid such attention to detail in the waves of enemies that were thrown at you.

Another example is the ability to swim. Rather than have every gap and hole mean an instant death for the player, there are many areas where falling off a platform allows you to swim back to safety (playing up the otter angle). In certain instances, you can swim off the beaten path, completely past difficult obstacles. Very few NES games offered the kind of freedom you get in this game that on the surface appears to have no rules to speak of.

NES games tended toward two schools - the bright and colorful, with often surreal color combinations necessitated by a limited color palette and the need to make the main character stand out, or overdone use of pseudo dithered gradients and muddy colors to appear more "mature". This game combines bright colors and a bouncy theme with a decidedly adult audience in mind.

Because of this, Utsurun desu carves out its own niche - a game so strange that it compels you to keep playing. Whether or not that makes it a good game is entirely up to the player.

Impenetrable? No...

Although I think the game would be confusing to even the seasoned, Japanese speaking NES player.

I think a gaming vocabulary helps more than command of the language - I'm sure there are some jokes and wordplay that I missed out on during my play through, but as the comic the game is based on is a parody of the genre, so is this game to other video games of the time.

And I was able to beat the game without speaking a lick of Japanese (any translation I did was after the fact), which in a curious way may have made the game even more enjoyable.

Thanks for the compliments too - this is #4 in a (slightly irregular) series, with more on the way - you can check out prior entries further back in this blog, or nicely categorized over at openedSource.